In the summer of 1897, a British explorer and his three companions set foot on the frozen shores of Spitsbergen, an island at the edge of the known world, with little but ski, sledge, and stubborn determination. Sir William Martin Conway had already crossed Spitsbergen once. This time, he wanted what no one had touched: the interior. What follows is a gripping account of weeks spent battling Arctic nothingness, climbing glaciers that had never known a human footprint, and camping on ice that groaned beneath their tent like something alive. Conway writes with the keen eye of a naturalist and the soul of a poet, cataloging fluorescent mosses, bewildered reindeer, and glaciers that shift like slow rivers of light. The illustrations scattered throughout these pages capture frozen cathedrals of ice that look almost too beautiful to be real. This is adventure writing from an era when exploration still meant something, when a man could stand on a peak no eye had ever seen and look out over an interior that mapped itself beneath his skis.
